Entries associated with the tag "Feminism":

Reader readers knew about Wangari Maathai and her tree-planting Green Belt Movement more than a decade before she won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize -- and before a change of Kenyan government turned her from an activist on the run to Kenya's assistant minister for the environment.

She got her higher education in the US in the 1960s, and not all of it in the classroom. As she told the Progressive in 2005, "While I was in the United States, Kenya became independent from the British, in 1963. For me, it was a moment to celebrate that finally we were free, as Martin Luther King was crying out at that time. And I thought we were going to enjoy our freedom, we were going to be happy, we were not going to be oppressed anymore. Little did I know what lay ahead. But when I encountered violations of human rights by my own people, my experience in the United States gave me the courage to stand up and say this is not right."

She's back in town this weekend to discuss her book Unbowed: A Memoir at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel, cosponsored by the university and the Chicago Humanities Festival (Sunday -- free but reservations required), and to dedicate a native woodlands garden at the Al Raby High School for Community and Environment at 3545 West Fulton (Saturday). 

Here's how Concerned Women for America sees the antiwar women activists at Code Pink (Christine MacDonald at Dallas Morning News, hat tip to Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon):

"Janice Crouse, a senior fellow with the conservative Concerned Women for America, said Code Pink members ... emphasize their femininity but advocate policies that are very aggressive and more often associated with men,' she said.

"'They cloak it all in a soft pink covering, when underneath they are hard as nails,' she said. 'They advocate for the most radical of leftist positions,' such as impeachment of the president.

"Ms. Crouse said her group has no position on the Iraq war but is 'very definitely not anti-war.'"

Code Pink's website is subtitled "Women for Peace," and the fourth item down on the page's list of issues is a petition to stop "honor killings" in general and to protest the stoning death of Du'a Khalil Aswad in Kurdistan April 7 in particular. These are causes associated with men?

Surely Crouse was trying to say that Code Pink is wrong on their policy positions. What she wound up saying was that it's "very aggressive" to oppose the Iraq War! Hasn't the lowbrow right-wing line always been that only cowards and wimps are against war?

Chris Clarke at Pandagon (hat tip to Stentor): 

"In a paper published a couple weeks ago, Dr. Sherilyn McGregor of Keele University in Staffordshire points out that when environmentally sound living requires extra work, that work is usually 'women’s work.' ... What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket. Using non-toxic cleansers. Adding corporate citizenship to one’s list of brand loyalty factors and schlepping the Seafood Buying Guide around. Sorting trash into the proper containers for recyclables, compost, and landfilling.

"Of course, we men carry all those containers to the curb, which perfectly balances the division of labor. But then you add Environmentalism 2.0 to the mix, and you have the Slow Food (read: hours spent in the kitchen) and Local Food (read: hours spent shopping) movements, and with that kind of scheduling pressure a woman likely wouldn’t even have enough time left in the day to type up her husband’s poetry."

That's not random snark -- Clarke is specifically referring to poet Wendell Berry's anti-computer tirade of a few years back, in which he explained that his wife types his stuff on an old Royal typewriter. It's all very well, as Keele writes in her paper, to idealize participatory citizenship as in Athens of old. But "as feminists have noted, these Athenian citizens were freed for politics by the labour of foreigners, slaves, and women who were not granted the status of citizen. Citizenship, understood as being about active participation in the public sphere, is by definition a practice that depends on 'free time'; it is thus not designed for people with multiple roles and heavy loads of responsibility for productive and reproductive work."

IOW, compartmentalized progressivism ain't progressive at all. 

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon would have been wasted on the John Edwards campaign. She points out that feminists have won a huge battle in most of the country, because now even their enemies "at least have to pretend to believe in some semblance of equality and at least try to appear they care about women’s own well-being. But where I grew up, people tended to be a bit more blatant....

"Classic example, since we’ve been talking about the Ann Althouse mentality where women are basically expected to exist for men and certainly not to compete with them academically—when I was in high school, I got in trouble for dress code violations a lot. One day one teacher (whose daughter was a cheerleader and therefore was required to wear microminis to school) sent me to the prinicipal’s for wearing a 'short' skirt. (It hit my knees.) After making me kneel down so they could measure the skirt, the principal said to me that I needed to wear jeans to school and think of the boys. Apparently, the glimpse of my knees was so erotically compelling that it could affect their studies and his not so subtle hint was that I, as a woman, needed to embrace my life’s mission of subsuming myself and everything I wanted to do and always, always put the boys first."

Unless you're a fundamentalist, those days are gone. But not forgotten. 

"The great accomplishment of the modern women's movement was to name [supposedly] private experiences -- domestic violence, sexual harassment, economic discrimination, date rape -- and turn them into public problems that could be debated, changed by new laws and policies or altered by social customs. That is how the personal became political," writes Ruth Rosen in the Nation. (Hat tip to History News Network.)

The economy has reorganized so that most women can be gainfully employed, but society has barely adjusted its unstated expectations that they should still also provide the unpaid care each of us needs at some point -- after birth, near death, or when disabled. This is not an individual problem, any more than Betty Friedan's "feminine mystique" was something that trapped housewives had to work out all by themselves. Rosen's account is OK, but nobody has framed this problem as well as Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at UMass Amherst, in her 2001 book The Invisible Heart.

"Talk to any woman who travels alone a lot, she probably has enough stories for a book or two!" says Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors, revealing one more annoying aspect of life that's been invisible to me in decades of life as a white guy. "Yesterday I got on a plane for the short trip (45 minutes or less) from Columbia, SC, to Atlanta, and found a man sitting in my assigned aisle seat. When he saw me stop at that row he leapt to his feet and gallantly gestured toward the interior seat. 'I think I have the aisle,' I said. 'Wouldn’t you prefer the window?' he asked. I shook my head and he finally moved in. A few minutes later the man sitting behind us pulled the same move, this time successfully, on a young boy."

On the connecting flight she was in her assigned aisle seat early. "Suddenly, I felt a hand apply a friendly grasp to my upper arm. A male face leaned over and the man wearing it said with calm authority, 'You need to move in.'" Read the whole thing.

Shakespeare's Sister [some words possibly NSFW] is fed up with comparisons between getting mugged for your money and getting raped: "Honestly, I can't even begin to tell you how much you don't get it if you can construe a woman walking alone and inebriated with a man walking alone with valuables hanging out of his pocket." The point being that both should be more careful.

"If you want an honest comparison, here's one: And also in an abstract moral sense, I should be able to walk around those same places in the middle of the night and not expect to have someone incapacitate me and cut my dick off. The reason that doesn't leap to your mind is because men's bodies aren't considered community property for the taking as soon as they get drunk, like women's bodies. Or visible $50 bills."

Scroll way down in the comments for some interesting additional thoughts from ACS. 

"The idea that men are babies comes from people that, hard as this may be to believe, support male dominance," not feminists. That's Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, who says the claim that men are born to be emotional cripples can be found in a book called Why Gender Matters by Dr. Leonard Sax, who's no feminist.  (More on his quackery at Language Log.)

"Why do so many people who support male dominance argue that their preferred social dominators are immature?" Marcotte goes on. "Well, because it sounds better than, 'Bitch, get back in the kitchen.'"

Alon Levy at Abstract Nonsense goes general on this, observing that some groups justify their power by saying they're strong and good, while others justify their power by saying they don't have any. Either way, it's all about the cover-up. "Power is more often than not asserted through claims that the other side lacks agency: the Indian caste system considers the members of the bottom class children who can do no wrong, Confucian autocracy as well as American capitalism is based on the idea that the best rise to the top, and European imperialism makes ample use of the concept of the civilizing mission."

But, he continues,  "When your power is overtly based on violence, it makes sense for you to minimize your own responsibility. The mafia does this by reminding would-be umerta breakers that anything that happens to them or their families is entirely the result of their ratting the don out, rather than of the don ordering a hit."  Likewise male supremacists:  she made me hit her.

William Cronon took naive environmentalist ideas about "nature" and "wilderness" to the woodshed in his talk at the Chicago History Museum on November 28.  (More on Cronon here, from this week's Reader.)

Among other things, he said that when you do restoration work, there's no obvious answer to the obvious question: What state do you restore a given landscape to? What's "natural"? The way it was in your childhood? Before European settlement? Before Indian settlement?

A few days after the talk, I came across an article by two European researchers, "What Is Natural? The Need for a Long-Term Perspective in Biodiversity Conservation," in the November 24 issue of Science (abstract here; full text requires a paid subscription, or a visit to a decent library). K.J. Willis and H.J.B. Birks (love those initials) confirm Cronon's point that "natural" is a culturally defined goal. Take invasive species, for instance:

"Sometimes it is even unclear whether a species is alien or native. . . . There is also the question of how far back one takes 'human' activity in determining whether a species is native or alien." Humans introduced at least 157 plant species to Britain between 4,000 and 500 years ago, and in 2004 one group of researchers proposed that these should be classified in a category in between native and exotic—dissolving the once razor-sharp distinction between "natural" and "unnatural." Everything over 4,000 years old is natural, everything under 500 years old is unnatural, and everything in between is half-natural? Why not 400 years? Six hundred?

If that's not enough to make your head hurt, Cronon went deeper in the Q and A after his talk. Feminism and environmentalism sometimes seem like they're headed for a train wreck of ideas. Environmentalists, he said, tend to see "nature" (however defined) as having some moral authority. Feminists, on the other hand, tend to see "nature" as lacking moral authority—it's often a way of pretending that many culturally defined gender roles are biological. Cronon plugged Kate Soper's 11-year-old book, What Is Nature?: Culture, Politics, and the Non-human (now on my short list unless the commenters talk me out of it—it's not cheap), adding, "Very little intellectual work has been done on how you critique nature as part of history without destroying its authority."

Amanda Marcotte has read one too many news stories that sound like The Handmaid's Tale:

"Between the Quiverfulls and the polygamous Mormons, it’s hard not to develop just a whiff of a hint that these oh-so-holy religious sects are about one thing and one thing only: phallic worship. I find it a little bit telling that God never, ever comes into people’s dreams to tell them that women are men’s equals or anything like that."

Never? Hardly ever? Counterexamples, anyone?  (I'm not sure Genesis 21:11-13 counts.)

"A majority of stay-home moms and dads are not only working as parents and housekeepers; they also serve as unpaid support and teaching staff for local public schools, unpaid case managers and caregivers for sick and elderly relatives, and unpaid volunteers/part-time help for a wide variety of social services and programs including libraries, hospitals, art, music, and sports programs, and political organizations," Bitch Ph.D. writes.

"In this regard we haven't, as a society, actually moved much *at all* in the last 50 years. The volunteer mom brigade *looks* a little less ladies-who-lunchy. . . . But cell phones and yoga pants aside, we're doing the same stuff. . . .

"It's not strictly a question of whether or not the 'working' parent should be 'paying' the at-home parent a wage for housekeeping and childrearing (through alimony, split incomes, separate IRAs, or what have you), or whether the government should be paying social security to stay-home moms (see here and here for more on that last one, and if you haven't read Crittenden's book yet, for god's sake do so). It's also that we still don't even fucking recognize the work being done as work; that we don't recognize that the women who do it are extremely vulnerable economically; that their cell phones and nice houses and koi ponds don't prevent them from being one divorce away from poverty, or well on the way to an indigent old age; and that, to be blunt, we owe them. We owe them respect, economic security, recognition, and status."

Don't miss the comments.

One of the few economists who takes this point seriously is Nancy Folbre in The Invisible Heart.

"My husband and I took turns attending the [scientific research conference] and playing with our daughter. When I was in mom mode, I became invisible to colleagues passing in the street of the small town in which the conference was held. When I was alone, everyone waved or stopped to chat. The difference was really striking, especially since my husband was visible whether he was with or without our daughter."

So writes the pseudonymous blogger at Scientist + Professor + Woman = Me. (And BTW, she makes a good case for pseudonymous blogging -- would you want to be that frank with your name attached? Especially when the world's full of well-educated professional guys who won't believe her?)

Fortunately, some men are also pointing out that the cultural and institutional climate of science can be hostile to women. Sean Carroll has a good post and a better discussion up at Cosmic Variance, focusing mainly on physics. Rob Knop contributes a useful taxonomy of problematic men (ranging from the minority of actual creeps down to the keep-your-head-down clueless). Meanwhile Knop's full blog post on the subject at Galactic Interactions has been taken down by order of his department chair (really! check it out!), whose writ hopefully reaches no farther.

In a more angry vein, a while back the definitely nonpseudonymous Zuska offered a darker take on what's supposed to be a feel-good story about a Fermilab physicist who faced all-but-insurmountable catch-22 problems with picking up her career after taking five years off to start a family.

None of these folks quotes Catharine MacKinnon, but they could: the field is organized so as to be perfectly fair, so long as you are either a man with a stay-at-home wife, or a woman who can impersonate one. 

Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy takes on the New York Times story (in its paid archive) about Slut-O-Ween, when women and grade-school girls alike can act out someone else's sexual fantasy. Vanessa at Feministing isn't pleased by the racial angle of some costumes, either.

Are these people are taking a silly holiday too seriously? Frequent commenter Mar Iguana at IBTP suggests one way of answering that question:

• Circular clouds, lots of 'em.  Can you say "lenticular"? (Hat tip to Kottke.)

• "Where ships go to die." It's in Bangladesh, and there's nothing automated about it. (Hat tip to Mental Floss.)

• A map of where Flickr photos come from.  If you have Google Earth, all the better; if not, you can see some cool stuff on the site. (Hat tip to The Map Room.)

• The Indiana Dunes on a winter day? No, this is Victoria Crater on Mars, about half a mile wide, as seen by the Mars Rover.
  

• If you've seen enough of the bimbos on the mudflaps of semis, maybe you're ready for . . . mudflap man.  (Hat tip to Feministing.)

Did the following proposal come from a male supremacist or a militant feminist--or just a fiscal conservative?

"Men and women should get the same access to law school--same tuition, same scholarships, etc. If, however, ten years after graduation, the law-school graduate is not working full-time at some job for which law school is a reasonable preparation, he, or more likely, she, will have to give the school back the money that it spent educating him or her over and above whatever was paid in tuition. The refunds would be put in a fund for scholarships for law students who could not otherwise afford to go to law school."

No fair clicking on the link until you've decided.

Women who decide to stay home with the kids or wear high heels often get into the same kind of trouble as black people who want to live in all-black neighborhoods. Some folks see them as voluntarily oppressing themselves when they choose to do what their male or white oppressors would want them to do.

Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon explains it so even I can understand: "'Choice feminism' is a derogatory word that feminists use to describe it when a woman wants her patriarchally approved compliant behavior to be declared perfectly independent of social influence, even when it is obviously not. . . . The most common form of it is, 'Feminism is about having choices and therefore my decision to submit to my husband/get breast implants/totter around on high heels and giggle is beyond analysis.' We’ve all invoked choice feminism out of misplaced guilt about our personal unwillingness to analyze our own choices."

Of course, her partisanship is showing. It's one thing to ask whether those who make conventional choices have really thought it through. It's bogus to answer the question for them, as Marcotte does, and state that no woman ever seriously analyzed her choices and then chose the "conventional" way.

For women in this bind, the pressure is mostly social, not legal. For black people it can have more drastic consequences. In Chicago, the ongoing Gautreaux case forbids the Chicago Housing Authority from building any new dwelling in ghetto areas unless it builds a corresponding dwelling in a nonblack area. Since the agency barely has the money to build anything, this will make it very difficult to build even a small amount of replacement housing in, say, the former Robert Taylor Homes neighborhood.

Gautreaux was brought 40 years ago on behalf of CHA residents to bring about integration, and some of that has been accomplished. Meanwhile, today's public-housing residents often want to continue living in their public-housing neighborhoods, even if they are segregated--and act accordingly. At the Henry Horner Homes, 75 percent of residents chose to stay in renovated quarters rather than move away. (Details in chapters eight and nine of the new book Where Are Poor People to Live?  The only online summary I have found is very brief. This 2000 commentary by David Ranney and Pat Wright is also relevant.)

But Gautreaux's doughty lead attorney, Alexander Polikoff, has the same attitude toward these residents' choices as Marcotte has toward women who stay home with their kids: they don't really mean it; generations of oppression have distorted their own desires. In Polikoff's view, "The risks of homelessness for some displaced families is not a reason to rebuild our high-rise enclaves." And his view counts for a great deal--since the court case continues, he basically holds veto power over where replacement housing gets built (outside of Horner, Cabrini, and ABLA, where deals of various kinds have already been cut).

Polikoff and Marcotte come off as condescending, but they're not all wrong. Having been taught to fear and obey does affect your mind--and there's a real-world price to pay for being an uppity woman, or the lucky black person who gets to integrate Hebron.

That's from a fifty-year-old musical, but it might be political philosopher Linda Hirshman's song today. As noted here before, she's down on educated women who choose to take care of children, because she thinks they're harming themselves and setting a bad example for others.

When by Mindy Farrabee on AlterNet asked her about the notion that raising children is the most important job there is, Hirshman laid down a series of personal attacks on those who disagree with her:

"I have no idea what they mean by that. If, in fact, it were the most important thing a human being could do, then why are no men doing it? They'd rather make war, make foreign policy, invent nuclear weapons, decode DNA, paint The Last Supper, put the dome on St. Peter's Cathedral; they'd prefer to do all those things that are much less important than raising babies?

"I love these sayings, because they're so stupid. I'll tell you what I think is actually going on: People think that women's lives aren't important enough to merit a real analysis. We get aphorisms in place of analysis. [This statement is demonstrably false and has been for years--see below.] Why do we say stuff like that instead of actually trying to figure out what's going on here when it's women whose lives are at stake? If you can make an argument for why childrearing--especially in the context that they are at school from the age of around five on for most of their waking hours--why that is the most important job, I'd like to hear that."

Note that "what men do" is Hirshman's standard, as in working all the time. (Note also that in the last sentence she hedges her position considerably.) Ruth Conniff in the Progressive takes a different view:

"Americans are still leading the world in warmaking, foreign policy (which has devolved into warmaking by another name, it appears), nuclear weapons, and, arguably, decoding DNA. But the countries that produced The Last Supper, Saint Peter's Cathedral, and many of the other lasting achievements of humanity tend to have a more enlightened view of the value of raising children than our country does."

Conniff quotes from the new book The Motherhood Manifesto: What America's Moms Want and What to Do About It. Nothing against that, but the best thinking on this topic is The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values, by feminist economist Nancy Folbre.  (Did you ever laugh out loud reading an econ book? You will when you see her take down Adam Smith one-handed.)

Folbre lays her cards on the table, and I'd love to see Hirshman try to trump them: "No society oriented exclusively toward individual success--to the exclusion of care for the next generation--can reproduce itself."  The question of who's going to do that used to be settled by forcing women into it. Now it's time to come up with a better answer.

Hirshman isn't helping, but at least she's honest enough to say she thinks it doesn't matter whether your primary parent is educated and ambitious or a time-serving drone. Hopefully that admission will speed the end of this branch of feminism.

Amananta at Screaming into the Void remembers to be grateful--and to whom!

"'Women were given the right to vote.' This is what we are taught. The statement is often framed as such, implying that non-women--i.e., men--gave them that right. The reality of why women can vote here and in many other countries does not match this rather tepid statement. In order to win the right to vote, women have defied husbands and fathers, spoke publicly, started organizations, created newspapers, held massive protests and marches, petitioned lawmakers, were jailed for protesting, went on hunger strikes, were force-fed and sometimes died, rioted in the streets, set fire to houses of anti-suffragists, and sometimes defied the law not allowing them to vote by forcibly inserting their votes into ballot boxes. . . .

"After 72 years of protest and increasing political action, women’s ceaseless advocacy on thier own behalf hounded and shamed American political leaders into ceasing their discriminatory suffrage policy towards women. This was not a gift or a boon, but a hard-won victory. Every social and political right won by American women after this time has been won only because feminist groups consisting mainly of women have fought for that right. Women led the fight for legal contraception, for legal abortion, for equal pay, for fair treatment in school, at work, in all spheres of society. Men have NEVER led a political struggle for women’s rights--NEVER. Men as a group have been greatly resistant to the point of hostility to women’s demands for equality and freedom, both to both the women who petition for freedom and any men who side with them.

"So who is it exactly, that women should be grateful to for our freedoms? Why, to feminists, of course!"

In the words of Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."

 (Hat tip to Feminist Law Professors.)

• So many ways to demotivate, so little time. Posters and paraphernalia to culture-jam any imaginable corporate propaganda.

• Brian Dillon at frieze: An established magazine has to "keep reminding your readers of that first flirtatious thrill, even as you settle into something like domestic routine with your faithful subscribers. At which point, in a sense, you’re already sunk: you’ve begun to second-guess your readers’ motives--or worse, to service their whims: their sensible preference for information over style, their taste for gossip, their impatience with illegible typefaces." (Hat tip to kottke.)

• Of 12 things Guy Kawasaki wishes he'd learned in school, one is how to give good voicemail: "First, slowly say your telephone number once at the beginning of your message and again at the end. You don’t want to make people play back your message to get your phone number. . . . Second (and this applies to email too), always make progress. Never leave a voicemail or send an e-mail that says, 'Call me back, and I’ll tell you what time we can meet.' Just say, 'Tuesday, 10:00 AM, at your office.'" (Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also quotes a list of 10 things never to buy new.)

• Forty-six kinds of male privilege, including item number 2: "I can be confident that my coworkers won’t think I got my job because of my sex--even though that might be true." Unlike most employers, symphony orchestras now have blind auditions, in which hiring decisions are made without knowledge of the applicant's sex. In a 1997 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse gathered data from audition records and found that blind auditioning “increases by 50 percent” a woman’s odds of getting past preliminary auditions, and increases by several times the chance that a woman will win the final round of auditions.

• Chartreuse intervenes on behalf of those born after 1982: "The only thing your parents got right was multiculturalism. Everything else is questionable. . . . I know we’re at war but the world is flat. A Jew hating redneck who lives next door is just that, a Jew hating redneck who lives next door. You probably have more in common with a skateboard-riding, hip-hop-listening kid who lives in India. It’s the values that are important, not the land." (Hat tip to Abstract Nonsense.)

Some welcome additions to my (burp) overstuffed RSS feed:

• As other see us. Ellen Perlman of Governing magazine visits the McDonald's Cycle Center at Millennium Park: "It's NICE."

• The last word (I wish) on the mommy wars, from Redneck Mother: "You know who I like to read on the topics of children and mothers? Mothers. Why? Because we know what we're talking about, because we share a common language despite our many differences, and because we are practical. We mothers are busy people. As much as I'd like to put in my two cents whenever a childless blogger holds forth on parentude, I often simply don't have time. And I've learned that hubris is best cured not by a lecture but by the direct experience of parenting. As my sister-in-law says, 'I was a great parenting expert until I had children.'"  In particular, don't assume that "mothers are deluded souls who need a wake-up call from others to throw off the shackles of their oppression."

• Why writing a negative book review is fun. Sam Harris on Francis Collins's attempt to move from science to religion: "To say that he fails at his task does not quite get at the inadequacy of his efforts. He fails the way a surgeon would fail if he attempted to operate using only his toes."

• Why does Barack Obama repeat the bogus Republican talking point that Democrats are always against wars? Ilyayavitz at SoapBlox Chicago: "It seems Democrats believe they can increase their popularity only by criticizing unnamed and confabulated elements within their own party. It reminds me of members of my family who tell Jewish jokes to their goy friends in order to curry favor with those who are not Jewish.  It also recalls the tragic and predictable manner whereby my gay friends attempt to gain recognition with heterosexuals by complaining about stereotyped behavioral traits heterosexuals assign to gay men." Dude, it totally doesn't work and it's not even funny.
  

As someone who's never personally traveled more than a few miles outside U.S. borders, I'm endlessly fascinated with others' endless fascination with Europe.

There's Good Europe, where social programs still work and (the old parts of) cities are still designed with pedestrians in mind.

Then there's Bad Europe, where there's lots of unemployment and they can't figure out what to do with the new immigrants.

Depending on your point of view, there's the Good/Bad Europe that often declines to play along with our current imperial adventure. 

The other day I learned of a Bad Europe in which academics have almost as much trouble with the notion that women are people as the folks at Jim Bob University. This, from a female science prof recently returned from a year's sabbatical at an unnamed university in an unnamed major city in an unnamed European country:

"When asked what my position was back in the U.S., I would reply that I was a professor. Sometimes I would be corrected, as if I were confused, and I was told that I may have a Ph.D., but in Europe that didn't mean I was a professor. * NOTE: I am deep into my 40s and had 'Professor X' on the nameplate on my office door *

"Another typical response to the news that I was a professor was the statement 'There must be a lot of professors in the U.S. It is not such an important position as it is here.' No of course not--how could it be if they let women be professors? There is an element of truth to the statement that professors are less 'important' in the U.S. than in Europe in terms of the academic culture, but no one ever told my husband that professors must be less important in the U.S. upon hearing that he's a professor, and it happened to me a number of times.

"And then there were the endless official government and university forms to fill out. These all assumed that my husband was filling them out, and there was always a space labeled 'wife' just for me."

And that's not all. Read the whole thing.

Which Europe did you visit? 

A nasty little discussion at Pandagon the other day flashed me back to the late 1970s. At my environmentally conscious workplace, I went out of the way to avoid mentioning that my wife and I were expecting our third child. I just knew that it would lead to some uncomfortable conversations.

Pandagon took this photo of a 16-child Arkansas family and ran it with a rather different caption. The civil version of the message: Women who have lots of kids are suckers.

That's been a feminist message from the beginning, to various degrees--it was recently stated uncompromisingly by legal scholar Linda Hirshman, whose new book urges educated women to defer or omit kids altogether so they can properly represent their gender and climb their chosen career ladder. "Live and let live" doesn't seem to be in her vocabulary, or Pandagon's. But why is it OK to say "If you don't like abortions, don't have one" but not OK to say, "If you don't want three--or sixteen--kids, don't have 'em"?

Few on the left or anywhere else observe how perfectly this attitude fits in with today's all-engrossing capitalism. ("Six-time breeder" Leslie Leyland Fields does, just a bit, in Christianity Today.) Jean Bethke Elshtain, now at the University of Chicago Divinity School, pointed this out in the Nation--back when I was keeping the peace by keeping mum--and caught hell for it.

"I wrote that the left should not simply embrace individualism," Elshtain told me in a Reader story December 6, 1996. "Feminists should not attack the family as such. After all, we criticize the consumer society because it undermines deeper human yearnings. Why should we seek to undermine relations that are noncontractual?"

In other words, if leftists distrust the free market because it breaks communities into isolated individuals who fulfill themselves by shopping (and who have to pay for all the help they need), then why spend so much energy attacking what's practically only remaining institution not based on cash transactions? Is there such a shortage of real problems?

In my ongoing quest to intensify the battle of the sexes and/or genders, a few juicy online discussions popped up on the radar Tuesday:

• Over at feministing, Jessica riffs on a Guardian story and asks what one should call pro-feminist men. One commenter observes that men who actually call themselves "feminists" are, in her experience, "generally the worst of the worst--not only misogynist pigs, but because they consider themselves enlightened, completely uneducatable." Sounds right to me.

• And at Terra Sigillata, Abel Pharmboy asks whether it would be a good idea for the Hooters franchise near a regular breast-cancer research symposium to do a benefit therefor? (He says it's already done at the corporate level.) I'm already in enough trouble here, so I won't even try to quote from the many astute and amusing comments.

• Hey, maybe battle of the sexes isn't enough: How about . . . Sharia women-only beach in Italy?  (Article from the Guardian, discussion from feministing once again.) There are more comments than even I can read, but one early commenter has this: "I'm not a Muslim woman, and I'd go to a beach like this . . . if only to avoid obnoxious frat boy types."

I'm not buying what feminist legal scholar Linda Hirshman is selling in her new book, Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World, and in related articles. When our children were young, my wife and I agreed that she should mostly stay home with the kids, a decision Hirshman unequivocally condemns for college graduates. "Choice" is just a weasel word, she says. (She also recommends against majoring in liberal arts, which my wife and I both did.)

But she really makes you think. In 1993, when she was teaching at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, I interviewed her and several other feminist scholars who explicitly rejected liberal feminism. It's not enough for women to be treated just like men, they argued; abstract ideas like "freedom" conceal real differences.

As Hirshman put it then, "Male liberal legalists have hidden the ball with their talk of neutral, universalizable principles." Sexual harassment laws limit freedom, but that's OK because without them women will be even less free. The full story is in the Reader's pay archives; here's the conclusion:

"Hirshman pulls back the drapes at one end of the room, revealing a Near North backyard in the early dusk, a tranquil composition in shades of silver, black, and gray. Hirshman calls this the 'navy blue' time of day--when too many women feel they have to be home.

"'Why? Because we're afraid. We don't walk under the shadowy trees, we walk in the middle of the street and carry flashlights on our key chains. We don't believe in freedom as an end, because we haven't enough of our own.'"

Now she's received a death threat.

Boys are not doing worse in school--their performance just isn't improving as fast as girls'. And far larger than any gender gap is the gap between white children and the rest. In high school, where boys are doing worse than before, girls are too.

Sara Mead, a "senior policy analyst" at Education Sector, uses nothing but data to demolish the latest "boy crisis" fad. As a bonus, she also plows salt into the ruins--explaining how a claim with so little basis in reality could be turned into a bevy of books and pop-magazine sociology.

The media, it seems, were just bored with the well-known socio-economic gap. Pundits, she argues, simply used the "boy crisis" to push harder whatever line they were pushing before:

"A number of conservative authors, think tanks, and journals have published articles arguing that progressive educational pedagogy and misguided feminism are hurting boys. . . . Progressive education thinkers, on the other hand, tend to see boys' achievement problems as evidence that schools have not gone far enough in adopting progressive tenets and are still forcing all children into a teacher-led pedagogical box that is particularly ill-suited to boys' interests and learning styles. . . . In other words, few of these commentators have anything new to say--the boy crisis has just given them a new opportunity to promote their old messages."

This heels-dug-in thinking reminds me of 9/11. Supposedly it "changed everything," but in fact those who were warmongers before kept right on, and those who thought everything would be fine if we just quit writing blank checks to Israel kept thinking that way too.

(Hat tip to Crooked Timber.)